Anna Mundowtells the tale of Foxwoods, the kingpin among Native American casinos, which opened in rural Connecticut only 15 years ago and now has 40,000 visitors every day.
Nothing prepares you for the sight of Foxwoods. Driving through a sleepy corner of southeastern Connecticut, you follow small meandering roads, dawdle on tree-shaded main streets, crest a low hill and, suddenly, there it is: the world's largest casino, filling the horizon like a gigantic candy-coloured spaceship sprouting a manic array of domes, turrets, spires, cupolas, antennae and portholes.
This pastel leviathan, suspended above the forest in a Disney-blue sky, is an alien presence not only in this landscape but also in the New England mind: Foxwoods, the mother ship of gambling, come to earth in the heartland of Yankee frugality and common sense.
Like any worthwhile alien, it dwarfs the host landscape and is spawning replicas worldwide. Whether you live in Europe, Asia, Africa or Antarctica, you should get ready for the super-casino apparition. It is coming soon, probably to a horizon near you. Take Manchester for instance - only a ferry or short flight away.
If gambling - now called "gaming", which sounds healthier, more outdoorsy - is the economic engine of the future, as Connecticut's Hartford Courantnewspaper recently proclaimed, then the super-casino resort is gambling's Walt Disney World: the magical destination that can resurrect the most moribund backwater.
To achieve this, one of mankind's oldest pastimes has undergone a cosmetic makeover. In the US, for example, from the desert sand of Las Vegas to the creaky boardwalk of Atlantic City, gambling traditionally meant mobsters, crooked politicians and an endless supply of suckers. Back then, before Vegas became "family-friendly", if a crooked politician had talked about the social or economic virtues of a new casino, even the mobsters would have cracked smiles.
Today, however, a self-styled moralist such as Tony Blair, can, according to the philosopher Mary Warnock, propose casinos "as a solution to the problems of the poor". Those friendly mobsters have been transformed as well, into corporate executives of multinational gaming corporations with empires extending from the Far East to the Upper East Side.
At first glance post-industrial England and rural Connecticut have nothing in common - except hard luck. "Foxwoods came along when the defence industry in Connecticut was downsizing," explains Rick Green, a Hartford Courantjournalist who has covered the story of the casino resort since it opened, in 1992. "Jobs dried up overnight when the region's two biggest employers, Electric Boat and General Dynamics, started laying people off in the early 1990s. Sure, the blue-collar defence job paid more than you can earn dealing craps or blackjack, but Foxwoods employs over 23,000 people. It did fill the void."
More importantly, Connecticut's first super- casino fills the state coffers. In a voluntary agreement between the state of Connecticut and the two Native American tribes that ostensibly run Foxwoods and the neighbouring Mohegan Sun casino, Connecticut receives 25 percent of slot-machine revenue from the two resorts' 13,500 machines, a deal unmatched anywhere in the US. Last year that share came to almost $500 million (€375 million).
"As long as the Brinks truck filled with cash is backing up to the state treasury every week there's not going to be a discussion about whether casinos are good for Connecticut," Green says. With New England's $2 billion casino-gambling business predicted to double in the coming year, Green's prediction seems like a safe bet.
"Across the country, Foxwoods' success would be emulated but never equalled," writes Kim Isaac Eisler in Revenge of the Pequots: How a Small Native American Tribe Created the World's Most Profitable Casino. "In the 10 years after the casino's grand opening, some 352 gambling parlors would open across the country, mostly in sparsely populated areas west of the Mississippi River."
Las Vegas still has the legendary name, while California and Arizona have the fastest growth rate in Native American casinos. But Foxwoods remains a case study of how casino gambling moves into a region and, critics say, an object lesson in what can result.
It all started improbably in 1973 when Elizabeth George, a Native American grandmother, died with nothing left of her Mashantucket Pequot tribe but a trailer and an 80-hectare (200-acre) tribal reservation that was slated to become a state park.
George's grandson, Richard Hayward, had other ideas. By creatively interpreting the arcane US legal code that governs Native Americans, Hayward and his associates expanded the Mashantucket Pequot tribe and its reservation while demanding the right to introduce gambling on tribal land. As the drama unfolded Hayward took on successive Connecticut governors and the casino moguls Donald Trump and Steve Wynn while forging alliances with supporters such as the Malaysian industrialist Lim Goh Tong, the Seminole chief James Billie and various Democratic and Republican politicians who anticipated fat donations to their election campaigns.
In 1992, for example, the then presidential candidate Bill Clinton told a San Diego town meeting that "reservations have been kept dependent too long. Gambling is a lousy basis for an economy". In 1993, however, a few months after his election, Clinton told the newspaper Indian Country Todaythat "gaming is a positive economic development tool for Indian tribes".
In the interim Hayward's 175-member Mashantucket Pequot tribe had donated some $215,000 to Clinton's Democratic Party. A year later it donated nearly $800,000. By then Foxwoods Resort Casino was well on its way to grossing $1 billion a year in its rapidly expanding complex. Almost overnight it became the world's largest casino, with 31,500sq m (340,000sq ft) of gaming space in a complex covering almost 450,000sq m (4.7 million sq ft).
The UK's first super-casino, by comparison, will have a minimum customer area of 5,000sq m and 1,250 unlimited-jackpot slot machines when it opens in Manchester.
Grandma George's house trailer is still here, a hallowed exhibit at Mashantucket Pequot Museum & Research Center, which opened beside the casino in 1998, at a cost of $193 million, and contains the largest Native American library in the US. Visitors can explore a 2,000sq m reconstruction of a 16th-century Pequot village, wander along forest trails and peek into wigwams. They can marvel at a depiction of an 11,000-year-old caribou hunt or admire exquisite Native American artefacts.
Mainly, though, Foxwoods wants its visitors to climb aboard the shuttle bus to the casino and start gambling. They do. More than 40,000 of them. Every day. Lured by Foxwoods' 7,000 slot machines - the adjacent Mohegan Sun has almost as many - by 400 tables offering 17 games, including 100 tables for poker alone, and by the world's biggest bingo hall.
Sweet old Yankee farm wives, fresh-faced soccer moms and hard-bitten chancers rub shoulders in an environment that must have been created by a Broadway designer with an unlimited budget and Tony Soprano sensibilities.
The tone is set by the Rainmaker, a huge sculpture of a kneeling, loincloth-clad warrior pointing his bow and arrow towards the casino's atrium skylight. Every hour, at his command, thunder rumbles along the hallways, triggering clouds of light to race across the slot machines that surround the statue while a tape loop tells the story of the ancestral Pequots.
When this happens first-time visitors are easy to spot. They are the ones staring and saying wow. But after a couple of hours, transfixed by the slot machines, they no longer seem to notice the spectacle.
"You know what's funny?" says Bill Westford, a Rhode Island carpenter who is here for a friend's bachelor party. "Nobody's smiling. Everybody's concentrating and looking really serious, like this is their job." He's right. Along row after row of slot machines, punters are hunched forwards, some slack-faced, some tense, each one oblivious to his or her neighbour. This makes mission control at NASA look relaxed.
When the slot machines began ringing at Foxwoods in 1993, after a brief battle in the state legislature, they were set to return 92 to 93 cents on every dollar bet, although the average in the US is 85 cents. The casino's adviser at the time was Al Luciani, an old hand from Atlantic City who once described the casino enterprise as "a simple business based on statistical advantage". Roulette, for example, has a 5.26 percent advantage for the house, which means that a player making 100 consecutive bets on the wheel, at $100 a spin, should lose $526 by day's end.
"Another thing," Westford says before rejoining his friends for Chinese food. "It's all women playing those slots."
It's not all women, but it is mostly women, and most of them are middle-aged, ordinary, what your mother would call "respectable".
Jeff Benedict, former president of Connecticut Alliance against Casino Expansion, confirmed this impression when he commented recently that "the flood of slot machines into this region has given rise to a new class of improbable criminal - middle-aged women, married with children, generally employed and with no criminal history - now residing in taxpayer-funded cells."
Everyone here recalls the case of the Massachusetts woman who locked her four children in the car for 17 hours, occasionally bringing them food and drink, while she lost the rent and grocery money playing the Foxwoods slots.
In 2001 the tax accountant for the nearby small town of Ledyard was jailed for embezzling more than $300,000 to support her slot-machine addiction. Four years later an accountant for adjacent Stonington was convicted of stealing $257,000 to feed her gambling habit.
By 1997, five years after the Foxwoods opening, personal bankruptcy filings in the local area quadrupled, with credit-card debt cited as the major cause. As one attorney observed at the time: "The casino has a credit-card swipe machine every five feet."
Connecticut's experience has prompted some states to think twice before embracing casino gambling. A 2004 study by researchers at Mansfield University, in Pennsylvania, revealed that the proposed introduction of slot machines could generate $247 million for the state but could also create 75,000 "pathological gamblers", costing the state more than $750 million a year.
A similar study by the University of Pennsylvania revealed that, among a random sampling of 843 people over 65 years of age, 11 percent were identified as "at-risk" gamblers.
Foxwoods keeps those grannies coming. Every few minutes courtesy buses from nursing homes and "assisted-living facilities" throughout New England and beyond arrive in the forecourt, delivering the spry and the feeble alike into the warm Foxwoods maw.
"The casino business has much in common with the tobacco business," Brett Duval Fromson, author of Hitting the Jackpot, recently commented in the Providence Journal. "Both profit by exploiting people's inability to limit consumption of the product . . . From 25 to 50 percent of a casino's profits come from fleecing people who can't control their gambling. They are fundamentally predatory."
Early Foxwood plans to build a high-speed train to the resort from Providence, about 100km away in Rhode Island, never materialised, but ferries from Long Island, trains from Manhattan and an extensive bus network ensure a steady stream of customers. "Nevertheless, Foxwoods is mainly a drive-to casino," says Rick Green, "and three hours is the average visit. They would like customers to stay longer."
Fromson confirms Green's finding. "As Foxwoods executives and Pequot tribal leaders admitted to me . . . the more you visit a casino, the longer you stay, the more you lose."
By next year the resort will have a new 85-room hotel, in addition to the 1,416 rooms and suites it already offers, and a second theatre that will accommodate 5,000 spectators.
"What they really want is the young male in his 20s, the risk player," says Green. "That's why you see them adding golf courses, bringing in the Hard Rock Cafe, building a state-of-the-art performance space."
Opponents such as Connecticut Alliance against Casino Expansion lobby against further resort development and have consistently fought the annexation of surrounding land by the Mashantucket Pequots - a particularly ironic twist given the region's early, and often bloody, colonial history of land transfer in the opposite direction.
One of the alliance's main arguments is economic. "The casinos have probably cost the state of Connecticut $3 to $5 to every $1 it takes in," Mary Beth Gorke-Felice, the alliance's founder (and the owner of a local bed and breakfast) recently commented.
"When people say Connecticut gets $500 million a year from the casinos, they forget that it costs residents three times that amount per year in land that has been taken into trust, taxes that aren't paid, businesses that can't compete and services that are required."
Many of the casino resort jobs pay less than $20,000 a year, and, despite the casino explosion, wages in eastern Connecticut remain below the state average.
One statistic, however, dwarfs all others. This year, while gambling, Americans will lose $90 billion. For Foxwoods and its clones, that is the only number that matters.